Fire | Special Issue : Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering

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14 pages, 18803 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Investigations of the Fire Behavior of Functionally Graded Concrete Slabs with Mineral Hollow Spheres

by Benedikt Strahm, Carl Niklas Haufe and Lucio Blandini

Fire 2024, 7(7), 256; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire7070256 - 18 Jul 2024

Viewed by 564

Abstract

Functionally Graded Concrete (FGC) allows for a significant reduction in the mass of concrete components while maintaining their structural and functional requirements and improving recycling capacity. This is achieved by inserting spherical mineral hollow bodies into the structure where no material is required. [...] Read more.

Functionally Graded Concrete (FGC) allows for a significant reduction in the mass of concrete components while maintaining their structural and functional requirements and improving recycling capacity. This is achieved by inserting spherical mineral hollow bodies into the structure where no material is required. Within the scope of this work, the behavior of FGC slabs exposed to fire is investigated both experimentally and numerically and compared to a corresponding solid cross-section. Therefore, FGC specimens are placed in a test furnace and subjected to fire exposure for 90 min. The temperature distribution, bending load-bearing capacity, and spalling behavior are investigated. The results of the numerical simulation of the solid cross-section are in good agreement with the values provided in the building code. However, for the FGC cross-section, differences in temperature at characteristic measurement points between the experimental and numerical results are observed, presumably due to convection. The experimental results suggest that the bending load-bearing capacity of the investigated FGC cross-section could be potentially greater than that of a corresponding solid cross-section. Furthermore, as expected through analytical analysis, the fire tests confirm that no spalling of the FGC specimens occurred. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering)

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15 pages, 1364 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Research on an Edge Detection Method Applied to Fire Localization on Storage Racks in a Warehouse

by Liang Zhang, Changsong Liu, Mingyang Li, Wei Zhang, Desheng Zhang and Zhibao Lu

Fire 2024, 7(7), 215; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire7070215 - 26 Jun 2024

Viewed by 906

Abstract

When a fire occurs on storage racks in a warehouse, it is not advisable to find the location of the fire point accurately, because there are a large number of goods on the storage rack, and many interference factors such as light will [...] Read more.

When a fire occurs on storage racks in a warehouse, it is not advisable to find the location of the fire point accurately, because there are a large number of goods on the storage rack, and many interference factors such as light will disturb the precise location of the fire. In response to the above problems, and thanks to the high-speed growth of deep learning technology, we propose an edge detection method and apply it in fire locations successfully. We adopt VGG-16 as our backbone and introduce an attention module to suppress background information and eliminate interference. We test the proposed method on our collected dataset, and the results show that our proposed model can extract the shelf edges more completely and locate the fire point accurately. In terms of detection speed, our method can achieve 0.188 s per image, which meets the requirements of real-time detection. Our approach lays a good foundation for the precise extinguishing of fire that occurs on storage racks. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering)

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20 pages, 5728 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Slate–Cork Laminate Enhanced with Silicone for Habitat Industry Application

by Juana Abenojar, Sara López de Armentia and Miguel Angel Martínez

Fire 2024, 7(5), 166; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire7050166 - 12 May 2024

Viewed by 1157

Abstract

This study investigates the feasibility of using a composite material comprising slate reinforced with cork sheets for architectural purposes like facades and wall coverings. The research involves the comprehensive characterisation of both slate and cork materials along with the evaluation of the silicone [...] Read more.

This study investigates the feasibility of using a composite material comprising slate reinforced with cork sheets for architectural purposes like facades and wall coverings. The research involves the comprehensive characterisation of both slate and cork materials along with the evaluation of the silicone adhesive used in their bonding process, specifically Sikasil^® HT from SIKA^®. It was found that both slate and cork exhibited low wettability, which was enhanced through cold plasma treatment. Subsequently, a composite sandwich structure was fabricated and subjected to impact testing in a drop tower, along with fire resistance evaluations. The fire tests revealed that when subjected to a flame of 900 °C for 15 min, the slate alone heated rapidly, reaching 500 °C within 3 min on the side opposite to the flame. However, the sandwich structure reached 260 °C on the cork side (opposite to the flame) at 7.5 min, maintaining this temperature until the deterioration or detachment of the cork between 11 and 12 min. This provided insulation and delayed ignition. The sandwich structure maintained its fire resistance due to the insulating properties of cork and the superior thermal resistance of silicone compared to other adhesives up to 260 °C. Overall, the results suggest the potential suitability of this sandwich structure for architectural applications. Its favourable adhesion properties and acceptable fire resistance indicate that it could serve as a viable alternative for construction materials in architectural contexts. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering)

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20 pages, 7946 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Building a Vision Transformer-Based Damage Severity Classifier with Ground-Level Imagery of Homes Affected by California Wildfires

by Kevin Luo and Ie-bin Lian

Fire 2024, 7(4), 133; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire7040133 - 11 Apr 2024

Viewed by 903

Abstract

The increase in both the frequency and magnitude of natural disasters, coupled with recent advancements in artificial intelligence, has introduced prospects for investigating the potential of new technologies to facilitate disaster response processes. Preliminary Damage Assessment (PDA), a labor-intensive procedure necessitating manual examination [...] Read more.

The increase in both the frequency and magnitude of natural disasters, coupled with recent advancements in artificial intelligence, has introduced prospects for investigating the potential of new technologies to facilitate disaster response processes. Preliminary Damage Assessment (PDA), a labor-intensive procedure necessitating manual examination of residential structures to ascertain post-disaster damage severity, stands to significantly benefit from the integration of computer vision-based classification algorithms, promising efficiency gains and heightened accuracy. Our paper proposes a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based model for classifying damage severity, achieving an accuracy rate of 95%. Notably, our model, trained on a repository of over 18,000 ground-level images of homes with damage severity annotated by damage assessment professionals during the 2020–2022 California wildfires, represents a novel application of ViT technology within this domain. Furthermore, we have open sourced this dataset—the first of its kind and scale—to be used by the research community. Additionally, we have developed a publicly accessible web application prototype built on this classification algorithm, which we have demonstrated to disaster management practitioners and received feedback on. Hence, our contribution to the literature encompasses the provision of a novel imagery dataset, an applied framework from field professionals, and a damage severity classification model with high accuracy. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering)

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16 pages, 25950 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Fire Protection of Steel Structures of Oil and Gas Facilities: Multilayer, Removable, Non-Combustible Covers

by Marina Gravit, Vasiliy Prusakov, Nikita Shcheglov and Irina Kotlyarskaya

Fire 2024, 7(3), 86; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire7030086 - 14 Mar 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1538

Abstract

Fire protection is required to protect metal structures of oil and gas facilities from fires. Such fire protection should provide high fire resistance limits: 60, 90, 120 and more minutes. Specialists of LLC “RPC PROMIZOL ” developed a multilayer, removable type of fire [...] Read more.

Fire protection is required to protect metal structures of oil and gas facilities from fires. Such fire protection should provide high fire resistance limits: 60, 90, 120 and more minutes. Specialists of LLC “RPC PROMIZOL ” developed a multilayer, removable type of fire protection made of superfine basalt fibre and ceramic materials for operation in Arctic conditions. Five experimental studies were carried out in standard and hydrocarbon fire regimes. The fire protection effectiveness of the products for I20 beams without load was obtained: a 50 mm thick coating provided 130 min of a standard fire regime; a 15 mm thick coating provided 60 min. The 15 mm thick coating provided 30 min of a hydrocarbon fire regime and the 50 mm thick coating provided 93 min of a hydrocarbon fire regime. The I40 beam under a load of 19.9 tf showed an R243 for the standard fire regime. The coefficients of effective thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity of fire-retardant compositions were determined by solving the inverse heat conduction problem. The problem was solved by modelling using the QuickField 7.0 software package, which implements FEM. Modelling showed that for obtaining the fire resistance limit R120 under the standard fire regime for the sample steel structure from an I40 beam, it is enough to apply fire protection with a thickness of 25 mm instead of 50 mm, which agrees with the experimental data. For the hydrocarbon regime, it is predicted that R120 can be obtained at a thickness of 45 mm instead of 50 mm. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering)

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14 pages, 3125 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Case Study on the Evacuation of People during a Fire in the Workshop of a Large Factory

by Yuru Fan, Hao Cui, Jiawen Qin, Changcheng Liu and Que Huang

Fire 2024, 7(2), 47; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire7020047 - 6 Feb 2024

Viewed by 2133

Abstract

A workshop, as a crowded place, is quite easy to cause serious casualties and economic losses once there is a fire. In this paper, Pathfinder software was used to simulate fire emergency evacuation in a workshop of a large factory with building structural [...] Read more.

A workshop, as a crowded place, is quite easy to cause serious casualties and economic losses once there is a fire. In this paper, Pathfinder software was used to simulate fire emergency evacuation in a workshop of a large factory with building structural symmetry. According to the simulation results, several obstacles to the evacuation were discovered and further analyzed. The results showed that the main factors affecting the evacuation were the width of exits, the distribution of occupants and the effective evacuation width of stairs. Among them, only changing the width of exits had little influence on shortening evacuation time. While changing the effective evacuation width of stairs could greatly relieve the evacuation pressure, every increase of 0.5 m in the width of the staircase could shorten the evacuation time by 30.0 s. Meanwhile, the larger the number of people in high-rise buildings, the longer the evacuation time was. Therefore, the means of restricting people from entering the high-rise buildings in batches could be used to prevent personnel from being evacuated in time when a fire incident occurs. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering)

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24 pages, 22209 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Wildfire-Residential Risk Analysis Using Building Characteristics and Simulations to Enhance Structural Fire Resistance in Greece

by Dimitrios Menemenlis, Palaiologos Palaiologou and Kostas Kalabokidis

Fire 2023, 6(10), 403; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire6100403 - 19 Oct 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3237

Abstract

Urban areas adjacent to wildlands are very dangerous zones for residents and their properties during a wildfire event. We attempted to connect wildfire simulations with field inventories and surveys to create a framework that can be used to enhance the fire resistance of [...] Read more.

Urban areas adjacent to wildlands are very dangerous zones for residents and their properties during a wildfire event. We attempted to connect wildfire simulations with field inventories and surveys to create a framework that can be used to enhance the fire resistance of residential structures located in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Legal restrictions and the lack of economic incentives for WUI residents greatly limit the potential to appropriately intervene to enhance their property’s fire resistance. By studying in situ the resilience of building materials and combining them with exposure metrics produced from wildfire simulations, we created an index that helps to assess fire risk at the property level. The proposed index can support property owners to optimally manage the vegetation near or inside their property. State agencies can use our proposed index to estimate with a consistent methodology which properties are more exposed and with higher risk from fire damage so that specific fuel and vegetation management practices on and around them can be suggested or enforced. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering)

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18 pages, 3957 KiB

Open AccessArticle

An Automated Fire Code Compliance Checking Jointly Using Building Information Models and Natural Language Processing

by Yukang Wang, Yue Liu, Haozhe Cai, Jia Wang and Xiaoping Zhou

Fire 2023, 6(9), 358; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire6090358 - 13 Sep 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1684

Abstract

Fire checking is indispensable for guaranteeing the fire safety of buildings as it reviews the compliance of the building with fire codes and regulations. Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems that check building data utilizing Building Information Modeling (BIM) against fire codes have emerged [...] Read more.

Fire checking is indispensable for guaranteeing the fire safety of buildings as it reviews the compliance of the building with fire codes and regulations. Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems that check building data utilizing Building Information Modeling (BIM) against fire codes have emerged as an active field of research. Substantial efforts have focused on analyzing the properties of the building components. However, the analysis of the spatial geometric relationships of building components has received inadequate attention. The present study proposes a novel ACC system leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to review the spatial geometric relationships of building components in BIM models. First, a framework for a BIM-based ACC system is delineated and decomposes ACC into three constituent subtasks: building model parsing, code knowledge translation, and compliance check result reporting. Second, an approach for structured processing of spatial geometric stipulations in fire codes using NLP is presented to review the geometric relationships between components in building models. Finally, the system’s performance is assessed by testing fire code compliance across various building types utilizing BIM models. The empirical findings demonstrate that the system achieves superior recall compared with the manually formulated gold standard, with the ACC system enabling quick, accurate, and comprehensive automated compliance checking. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering)

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Review

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28 pages, 3749 KiB

Open AccessReview

Contemporary Fire Safety Engineering in Timber Structures: Challenges and Solutions

by Xiaowei Zang, Wei Liu, Dali Wu, Xuhai Pan, Wei Zhang, Haitao Bian and Ruiqi Shen

Fire 2024, 7(1), 2; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire7010002 - 20 Dec 2023

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3220

Abstract

As environmental conservation and sustainability gain prominence globally, modern timber structures are receiving increased focus. Nonetheless, the combustible nature of timber raises significant fire safety concerns. This review explores the recent advancements in fire safety engineering for timber structures, emphasizing both contemporary high-rise [...] Read more.

As environmental conservation and sustainability gain prominence globally, modern timber structures are receiving increased focus. Nonetheless, the combustible nature of timber raises significant fire safety concerns. This review explores the recent advancements in fire safety engineering for timber structures, emphasizing both contemporary high-rise buildings and historical timber constructions. It covers topics like inherently safer design principles, fire risk prediction, and evacuation methodologies. The review emphasizes the criticality of selecting suitable materials, structural design, firefighting systems, and advanced sensor technologies for early fire detection. Additionally, we analyze and compares various evacuation strategies, offering insights into the challenges and future directions for fire safety in modern timber structures. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Building Fire Safety Engineering)

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